San Francisco, CA, USA – August 25, 2008

Creative Commons announced today that Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake has joined its board of directors.

Fake cofounded the massively popular photo sharing site and community in early 2004. Flickr was one of the first media-sharing sites to embrace Creative Commons licensing as a way to encourage users to make their work available to the public for free and legal use. Since the site’s inception, Flickr’s community of photographers have licensed over 75 million photos to the public under Creative Commons copyright licenses, making it one of the biggest sources of permissively-licensed material on the Internet. CC-licensed Flickr photos are now used in a variety of projects and publications, ranging from Wikipedia to The New York Times.

After Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, Fake helped develop Yahoo’s social search products, ran its Technology Development Group, and founded Brickhouse, a rapid development environment for new products. She left Yahoo in June 2008 and subsequently took on the role of Chief Product Officer for startup Hunch. Fake is also a writer and artist, and was Salon.com’s art director prior to founding Flickr.

“Creativity flourishes when ideas are freed from legal impediments, when people are able to create and give,” Fake said. “In both my personal and professional work, I’ve seen Creative Commons remove obstacles, allowing the best of culture and ideas to be freely shared. I hope to be able to contribute to Creative Commons’ already significant success.”

“We’re thrilled that Caterina is joining the CC board,” said Joi Ito, Creative Commons’ CEO. “Her vast experience in business and social media make her a perfect addition to our team. We’re all honored and excited to be able to take advantage of her expertise and abilities to advance Creative Commons’ mission of increasing access and reducing barriers to collaboration.”

Fake has won many awards, including BusinessWeek‘s Best Leaders of 2005, Forbes‘ 2005 E-Gang, Fast Company‘s Fast 50, and Red Herring‘s 20 Entrepreneurs Under 35. She was named to the Time 100, Time‘s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. She sits on the boards of Etsy and Hunch, and advises a variety of startup companies.

Fake joins a board of directors that includes cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, Lawrence Lessig, Eric Saltzman, and Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, as well as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, education innovator Esther Wojcicki, filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, Public Knowledge founder Laurie Racine, and MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson.

About Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public. For more information about Creative Commons, visit creativecommons.org.

Contact

Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
eric at creativecommons.org

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